ABSTRACT
The ‘garbage crisis’ that struck public consciousness in the late 1960s continues unabated. The slums of the developing world, garbage dumps like Jardim Gramacho (Walker 2010), children recycling e-waste in China and India, shipwrecks on Bangladesh’s beaches, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – all serve as shocking evidence for impending doom. Critical of invocations of ‘crisis’, scholars have illustrated that garbage crises have much longer histories and have likely had a consistent place in human imagination ever since people lived in larger settlements (Melosi 2005; Rathje and Murphy 2001). Nonetheless, contemporary rhetoric casts garbage as an urgent global problem, obscuring the deeper histories, placed and raced particularities, and very concrete implications for local people (Frickel 2012; Pellow and Brulle 2005; Pellow 2004; Bond 2002; Bullard 2000; Hurley 1995). Instead, these tales render the places conquered by waste – predominantly located in the Global South – mere symptoms of larger trends and global patterns. But garbage is a global problem only for the ‘environmentally enlightened’, who do not suffer from economic stagnation, toxic pollution, climate change, soil erosion, population explosions, deadly epidemics, and mass poverty on a daily basis (Mills 2001). Although undeniably bound to and by global capitalism (O’Brien 2008), the global garbage crisis has morphed into a media event of epic proportions against which the Global North performs its techno-political dominance. The ostensible superiority is itself the result of previous garbage struggles that effectively pushed garbage into the margins of Western consciousness. The successful hiding of systemic waste in the West (Gille 2007) enables the affluent, overproducing nations of the world to project their regressive fantasies and real suspicions about absolute limits to supposedly limitless economic growth onto the developing world. Western doominfused eco-consciousness depends on the piles of seemingly unnoticed, uncollected refuse in ‘Elsewhere’ to effectively apprise the unaware: if we do not change our ways, this will be our future, too. Yet, even such premonitions have histories. The West’s recognition of its own global entrapment parallels its discovery of the environment as a political sphere and the many crises it faces as grounds for political mobilization (Ponting 2007; Dryzek 2013; Allitt 2014). This chapter focuses on perceptions of the urban garbage crisis in two American cities rather than its subsequent transposition to the Global South. I illustrate
that everyday garbage practices invisibly but consistently reproduce the social, racial, and environmental inequalities that pervade (and in fact order) capitalist societies more generally. Retrieving the garbage histories of Detroit and Los Angeles, I tell a triangulated story of crisis, technology, and citizenship.1 Here, placed histories, struggles over resources, racialized politics, grandiose technological visions, actual materials of history, and their visualization come together and pull local communities and their labour into a matrix that, for lack of a better term, we call globalization. In the context of their respective garbage histories, the polarities between Detroit and Los Angeles appear in a different light. In both cities, the visibility of garbage in the public sphere has led to multiple recognitions of ‘crisis’ which, in turn, sharpened political debates over garbage ‘solutions’ and spawned protests by local citizens. And in each case, garbage problems crystalized as complicated reiterations of past garbage solutions. The notion of a waste stream is crucial here. As a techno-political construct it obscures the underlying systemics of garbage regimes. Garbage does not flow. It is pushed, carted, trucked, and shipped wherever it is ultimately buried or burned. The language of crisis, whether articulated with a local or a global point of reference, reads garbage as a terminal story. In this chapter I am taking the opposite approach, looking backwards, not for origins of the problem but for the origins of presumptive solutions.
